What kind of hard disk failure is this

[umala]

Hi!

My WD HD is 3.5 years old and yesterday, I suddenly heard to CRACKING sound from it and then the HHD LED was on for long time although my PC was idle. After the HDD LED was on for about a minutes, the system froze.
I turned off the machine and the BIOS cold not boot pass to the point of reading hard disk info. I felt terrible believing losing some important data.
This morning, I open the PC case to take the WD out and once it is out I just tried to connect cable and power cord to it again to see any hope. perhaps, I had done some " shaking" to HDD and this time, it was in VERTICAL position instead of HORIZONTAL like was inside the case. Miracally, the HDD works again and seems to ahve no problem now.

My question are:
1) For high precision product like hard disk, how could my "shaking" brought it to life a gain
2) Is it true that the final dead of the HDD is not really far away and that i should not use the HDD anymore for the sake of my data.

Thnaks

 

[wuzy]

Whether it dies or not, you should have a backup of your personal data backed up on another drive already. HDD are cheap these days so there's no excuse.

A loud click followed by non-detection usually always results in a dead drive. How you revived your is a miracle. And miracles rarely happen twice.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

I think you got really really lucky. Replace it as soon as you can.

 

[Paperdoc]

I fully agree with getting all your data backed up right away. Then I suggest you download, install and use a set of disk testing utilities available free from the website of your hard drive manufacturer, WD. It is called Data Lifegard.

If you are really lucky, the cracking you heard may mean very little and the problem may have been cured. After some use time, it is relatively common for pins and connectors on power and data cables to get a bit dirty, even from something simple like slow oxidation of the metal. Just the physical scraping action involved in unplugging and re-connecting these cables a couple of times can clean the contacts and everything works perfectly!